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It was, in the words of the Washington Post‘s
executive editor, Martin Baron, “the grimmest” of milestones. On Dec. 3, Jason
Rezaian, the newspaper’s Tehran correspondent, spent his 500th day in Evin
Prison. He has now been detained in the Iranian capital two months longer than
the 52 Americans who were held captive in the U.S. embassy by radical students
who stormed the building in 1979, heralding a revolution and the end of Iran’s
formal diplomatic relations with America.

For the moment at least, the prospect of Rezaian being freed appears
based more on hope than solid facts. There is no sign Iran’s judiciary, in
spite of last summer’s nuclear deal with the West, is softening its stance. If
anything, it has been sending strong indications that it will refuse to be
influenced by outside pressure. On Nov. 22, a judiciary spokesman in Tehran confirmed Rezaian had been convicted on charges of
espionage and that his punishment included jail time. The length of his prison
sentence was not disclosed; the offenses are thought to carry a maximum jail
term of 20 years.

Having first warned of foreign “infiltration” in September, Supreme
Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei took an even harsher line on Nov. 25. “There
is a deceitful, crafty, skillful, fraudulent, and devilish enemy,” he told
commanders of the Basij militia, a volunteer paramilitary force that takes
orders from the country’s powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. “Who is
that enemy? Arrogance. Of course today, the manifestation of arrogance is
America.”

Khamenei went further, suggesting foreign investment and cultural
influences would be the first way the West would try to bring down Iran’s
Islamic system. “The most important means are two things: One is money and
another is sexual attraction,” he said, warning that Iran’s “decision-makers
and decision-builders” would be targeted by foreigners who want to change the
beliefs and lifestyle of Iran’s people.

The
comments are a world away from the pragmatism Khamenei showed in agreeing to
the nuclear deal just months ago. While the supreme leader seemingly
wanted a deal to end sanctions so that Iran could rejoin the global economy,
his actions since suggest he doesn’t want to upset loyal elites who have been
enriched in the past decade.

Basij
commander Mohammad Reza Naqdi wasted little
time in following the supreme leader’s cue. Two days after
Khamenei’s remarks, he claimed the United States had allocated $2 billion to
depose the regime in Tehran. He explicitly placed Secretary of State John
Kerry, the man with whom Iranian diplomats negotiated the nuclear deal, at the
center of the conspiracy. “Some $200 million out of this sum was given
personally to John Kerry,” he said. “Kerry has so far headed 34 projects to
depose the Islamic regime.”

Both
Rezaian’s imprisonment and Naqdi’s allegations signal not only a split within
Iran’s political elite over its future relations with the United States, but
also a deeper divide between its politicians and long-suffering people. While
the religious power center of the Islamist establishment seems more vehement
than ever about the need to protect the principles of the 1979 revolution, many
of Iran’s technologically savvy young population shun the mosque and look
outward to the West for its entertainment and inspiration.

As
such, many are still leaving the country, convinced their hopes cannot be
realized. “I am not free,” said Golnaz, a 33-year-old MBA graduate who recently
moved to Canada to join a tech firm. Being friends with foreigners led to her
being followed and her emails being hacked. She believes President Hassan
Rouhani is trying his best, but, given the resistance he faces, it is not worth
the risk of continuing to waste years of her career.

Rouhani
and his top officials are caught in the middle between the people and the
regime. Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif initially said that he hoped Rezaian would be found not guilty but has
since backed off that line when questioned about the reporter’s fate, probably
sensing the backlash in an increasingly abrasive domestic climate. “The charges
are serious and it’s a judiciary process,” Zarif said on Oct. 17, five days after the Washington
Post first reported Rezaian had been convicted.

Rouhani,
meanwhile, has openly raised the possibility of a prisoner swap, thought to
involve at least three Americans, including Rezaian, for 19 Iranians convicted
of sanctions offenses in the United States.

“If
the Americans take the appropriate steps and set them free, certainly the right
environment will be open and the right circumstances will be created for us to
do everything within our power and our purview to bring about the swiftest
freedom for the Americans held in Iran as well,” Rouhani said of the 19 jailed Iranians at the U.N. General
Assembly in New York on Sept. 27.

His
remarks, however, were followed by a sharp reminder at how little control he
apparently exerts over many of his country’s security institutions. Barely two
weeks later, the intelligence section of the Revolutionary Guards arrested an Iranian-American businessman, Siamak Namazi,
at the home of relatives in Tehran. Around the same time it emerged that a
Lebanese IT expert with residency in the United States, Nizar Zakka, had disappeared after a conference in the Iranian capital
a month earlier. Adding to Rouhani’s image of powerlessness, Zakka had been
invited to Tehran by the government. State television, a fiefdom of hardline
conservatives who operate under Khamenei’s authority, later said Zakka was
arrested for spying.

Namazi,
though long based in Dubai, is well known in Iran. His family’s Atieh Group had
strong business connections with the government during the presidency of
Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, from 1989 to 1997. Namazi also spoke out in favor of better Iranian-American relations
and, while serving as a partner of Atieh’s Tehran consultancy, had advised
foreign companies on how to do business in the Islamic Republic.

The
latest arrests are another embarrassment for Rouhani who has made a major play
for foreign investment to rebuild Iran’s sanctions-ravaged economy. On Nov. 28,
more than 100 foreign companies in the oil industry, headed by Shell, BP,
Total, and Petronas, came to Tehran and heard Iran’s oil minister make a pitch
for $30 billion of investment. There was undoubtedly interest among the
visitors — but if the IRGC continue to arrest foreign businessmen, the
enthusiasm could quickly disappear.

As
harsh as Khamenei’s remarks appear, a more optimistic interpretation is that
the government is willing to take symbolic actions that signal a staunch
anti-American stance — while in reality having no practical effect. On Nov. 5,
for instance, the Ministry of Industry, Mines, and Trade announced it would ban the import of all American consumer goods. A
push “to boost national production” was necessary instead, officials said.

The
announcement was greeted by laughter among many Iranians. “They are already
here,” Sara Ahmadi, a 30-year-old business executive, said of foreign brands,
pointing out that there are three Nike stores on one Tehran street alone. Those
shops, stuffed with clothing and exercise equipment bearing the famous “swoosh”
logo of the world’s largest sports manufacturer, feature genuine merchandise —
not the Chinese knock-offs sold in street markets in the capital. Several
of the massive malls that have opened in Tehran in recent years also have Nike
stores.

But
it’s instructive that those malls were all built by companies linked to the
IRGC. Iran has had commerce in Western goods in recent years, but it has mostly
been restricted to regime loyalists. The hiked prices of the Nike goods on sale
in Tehran suggest they were smuggled in to the country, likely from Dubai or
Turkey, with the cooperation, whether tacit or explicit, of the Iranian regime.
The inflated prices for premium Western products also mean that only the
country’s economic elite, which overlaps strongly with its political elite, can
afford to buy them.

While
such contradictions perturb Iran’s rapidly aging clerical leadership, they
leave Rezaian and his fellow captives looking like bit part players in a much
bigger puzzle.

The
nuclear deal may well have made the diplomatic deals struck in the past
considerably more difficult today. In 2010 and 2011, for instance, three
American hikers detained by Iran were freed after Oman brokered their release.
Then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had ordered them to be freed, only to be
temporarily thwarted when the judiciary cancelled their release.

Iranian
authorities, such as the IRGC and the judiciary, seem inclined to play the same
game with Rouhani. Even talk of a prisoner exchange in the aftermath of the
nuclear deal seems certain to provoke hard-liners dead set against any broader
opening toward the United States.

“To
the hard-liners that would look like another deal with America, and they don’t
want to send that signal,” said a Western diplomat in Tehran.

The
growing list of people languishing in prison, including dozens of Iranian
nationals on political charges, continues to dent Rouhani’s “moderate”
reputation ahead of parliamentary elections in February next year, seen as a
crucial test of the president’s clout and his hopes of re-election in 2017.
Though most Iranians see the judiciary rather than Rouhani as the culprit, he
is a potential fall guy for the frustrated.

“The
government has been backed into a corner and, whatever they do, Rouhani and his
people face a problem in getting out of this mess that the judiciary has
created,” the diplomat said.

But
more hopeful Iranians say Rouhani retains public confidence and shouldn’t
buckle in the face of provocations from the most anti-Western elements of the
regime. If the hard-liners are routed in the February elections, Rouhani will
have a stronger mandate to pursue his agenda.

“Ahmadinejad
and his cronies are not coming back,” a veteran political analyst said. “The
public mood has shifted and this is the hard-liners’ last hurrah. The worst
thing Rouhani could do would be to kowtow to them. But for now at least, none
of that helps Jason Rezaian.”

On December
2, the Syrian branch of al Qaeda known as Jabhat Al Nusra freed 16 Lebanese
soldiers and policemen in exchange for the release of 29 Islamists and their
children, who were all imprisoned inLebanonandSyria. Broadcast live on Lebanese andQatarisatellite
television, the prisoner swap was a spectacle. More than that, its symbolism,
strategic significance, and regional ramifications were immediately the topic
of vigorous debate.

It didn’t take long for the Lebanese
to critique the transaction. As the freed hostages were hugging their parents
in Beirut upon their return, Lebanese commentators were already bemoaning the
“tragedy that had just transpired.” Politicians from all walks of life couldn’t
believe that their government had just completed a “deal with the devil.”
Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, for example, called the episode a “sovereignty
scandal,” despite the fact that Hezbollah, with which Berri is allied, had an
active role in securing the deal.

A closer look at who got what
explains the general mood of anger and disillusionment among most
Lebanese.

Starting with the positives: First,
by getting back its men alive, Beirut communicated to the country’s military
that, no matter how long or how much it takes, it will not abandon Lebanese
soldiers when they are abducted. Whether Lebanese officers
will find comfort in their state’s performance is unclear,
though, since several of their comrades were slaughtered by the same terrorists
not too long ago. But this event’s happier ending might boost morale and
maintain the unity of an army that is overstretched and under equipped and that
is fighting terrorism day and night across the country, particularly along its
northern borders with Syria.

Second,
even though the events are still murky, the Lebanese authorities have claimed
that they refused to release any Islamist extremists from prison who have
blood on their hands or active terrorism cases against them. It is hard to
verify that without access to sensitive information, though.

Third,
and perhaps most important, the deal was a product, or a harbinger, of
political accommodation between rival Lebanese political factions, specifically
between the Shia Hezbollah and the Sunni Future Movement. Indeed, the swap
would have been impossible had Hezbollah secretary general Hassan Nasrallah and
Future Movement leader Saad Hariri not cooperated. For instance, Hariri flew to
Doha to persuade the Qataris, who acted as brokers throughout this 16-month
hostage crisis, that Abbas Ibrahim, chief Lebanese negotiator and head of the
country’s General Security Directorate, is someone worth trusting,
despite his strong support for Hezbollah.

Meanwhile,
Nasrallah convinced his ally Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to
release three women and nine children imprisoned in Syria that were on
Jabhat Al Nusra’s demand list (one of those women is Khalidiyya Hussain
Zeiniya, the sister of Abu Malek Al Talli, the group’s commander in the
Lebanese Qalamoun area). This moment of accord between Nasrallah and Hariri
could facilitate the election of a new Lebanese head of state after a year and
a half of political vacuum.

Yet this
outcome came with heavy costs. The sight of terrorists waving black al Qaeda
flags and operating in full military uniform with impunity on Lebanese soil and
in broad daylight was painful and humiliating for the Lebanese people. More
practically, by agreeing to the swap, the Lebanese state projected weakness, or
at the very least, sent the message that it is not opposed to doing business
with terrorists. That, in turn, could invite more kidnappings and longer lists
of demands. The Islamic State (ISIS) holds nine other Lebanese
soldiers and police members hostage; one wonders what Beirut would give up to
release them. ISIS, a larger and more powerful movement than Jabhat Al Nusra,
might be able to extract more from the Lebanese state should it decide to
negotiate. But beyond the popular astonishment and the fears over the price tag
of potential future terrorist deals, the Lebanese state’s inability to expel
Jabhat Al Nusra from Lebanese territory and end its control of the northern
town of Arsal is the clearest evidence of Lebanon’s failure to win in this
exchange what mattered most: the protection of sovereignty and territorial
integrity.

For its
part, in addition to the safe haven of Arsal, Jabhat al Nusra, might have also
benefited from creating an image of a terrorist group that is capable of
mercy and pragmatism in ways that ISIS is not. That reputation could help it
gain a political future in Syria.

To be
sure, there were some costs and compromises for the group too, including the
failure to release hundreds of other high-profile extremists from the Lebanese
prison of Roumieh or to force Hezbollah to withdraw its men from Syrian
territory. But Jabhat Al Nusra knew that the latter demand was unrealistic and
the formal loss was tolerable, compared to what it was able to gain.

For a relatively small prisoner
swap, this deal’s complexity was remarkable, as evidenced by the number of
local, regional, and internationals players that were involved. Key to the
success of the deal was Qatar. In a previous article inForeign Affairs called “The Dishonest Broker,” I wrote about Qatar’s desire to cement its role
as a go-to mediator in the region. Its active involvement in this hostage
crisis, which Doha made sure to air live on its satellite channel Al Jazeera for
all the world to see, is the latest example of the small
country’s commitment to playing an oversized mediation role, despite
serious concerns by its neighbors about its real intentions. Yet regional
questions about Qatar’s good offices notwithstanding, the truth is that Western
countries, including the United States, find value in Doha’s access to some of
the Middle East’s bad actors. After all, if bombing terrorists
and adversaries fails, somebody has to facilitate talks.

The level
of pragmatism that Doha displayed throughout the negotiations was notable.
Qatar and Hezbollah have a visceral and strategic disagreement over Syria—the
latter doing everything in its power to ensure Assad’s survival and the former
committing to his toppling—but it didn’t stop Qatari emir Sheikh Tamim bin
Hamad al Thani from cooperating with Nasrallah to secure the release of the
Lebanese hostages. Specifically, following instructions from Tamim, the Qatari
intelligence services convinced Jabhat Al Nusra leaders to refrain from upping
their demands in the final minutes of the negotiations and go for the
deal.

But
realpolitik wasn’t limited to Qatar and Hezbollah. Turkey, which provided
logistical assistance by hosting talks on multiple occasions between lead
Lebanese negotiator and leaders of Jabhat Al Nusra under Qatari mediation,
agreed to receive some of the freed prisoners of the terrorist group. Russia
and the Syrian government, who have adversarial relations with Ankara, agreed
to a ceasefire between Hezbollah and Jabhat Al Nusra along the northern
borders. Iran implicitly blessed the deal through Ali Akbar Velayati, a top
advisor to the Supreme Leader who recently visited Beirut. And although Saudi Arabia did
not have a direct involvement in the swap, its controversial and surprising
approval of the nomination of Suleiman Franjieh as Lebanon’s new president,
despite his close personal friendship with Assad (whom Riyadh is committed to
deposing) and undeniable support for Hezbollah (which is suspected of killing
Rafik Hariri, Saudi Arabia's main man in Lebanon), contributed to the overall
de-escalation of tensions.

Prisoner
swaps typically require compromises by both sides. But in this particular deal,
it must be said, Jabhat Al Nusra emerged as a winner. What’s tragic is that
Lebanon is not in a position to correct wrongs and retake what was lost.
The Lebanese army is incapable of dislodging all terrorists from the north
and Hezbollah, despite its tactical successes against Sunni extremists, is busy
securing its own areas in the southern suburbs of Beirut and fighting its
enemies on Syrian territory. Only the end of the Syrian conflict can
effectively neutralize the Sunni militant threat to Lebanon and
prevent another costly swap. That sworn adversaries momentarily set aside their
differences to achieve this latest deal offers hope, but it will take a much
bigger dose of pragmatism and compromise to reach a solution to the civil war
in Syria.

Thursday, November 26, 2015

Before Crimea was
Russian, or Ukrainian, or even Soviet, it was Turkish. Well, Ottoman. And
Russia had already annexed Crimea once before 2014, long before — in 1783. This
was after a six-year war with the Turks, in which the Russians essentially
wiped out the Ottoman navy. The conflict ended with the Treaty of Kainardrji,
signed in 1774, which has come to be seen by historians as the first partition
of the Ottoman Empire, the beginning of its long, slow decline. In losing
Crimea to Russia, the Ottoman Empire, for the first time ever, lost Muslim
subjects to a Christian power. (The Crimean Tatars, who have been especially
opposed to Moscow’s newest takeover of the peninsula, are the vestigial limb
left behind by the Ottomans, bucking again at its new Russian owner — which
has, in turn, cracked down on them.)
That war and the treaty that ended it, Bernard Lewis wrote some 200 years
later, was “the turning point in the relations between Europe and the Middle
East.”

Nor would it be the
last time the Russians and the Turks butted heads. Over the next two centuries,
they would clash again and again as the Russian Empire pushed deeper and deeper
into the Ottoman heartland: the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Black Sea, and the
Dardanelles. One young Russian army officer wrote about his experiences
fighting the Turks, French, and British at Crimea, in 1854. The work, which
came to be called The Sevastopol Sketches, was the
second the young man — Leo Tolstoy — ever published.

Which is all to say
that what happened yesterday, when the Turks and Russians clashed over who was
where when in the skies over a small sliver of land is nothing new in the
relations of these two erstwhile empires.

For that is what
they are. Both

Turkey and Russia
have the hearts and souls of massive, multi-ethnic empires, hearts and souls
that still beat inside trunks shorn of their expansive limbs, limbs for which
they still hunger today. Both exist today as greatly diminished, regional
powers struggling to project greater influence — the kind that befits empires
and their histories. And, in doing so, they assume their old stances, as if
from muscle memory. “When you travel to Turkey, do you trust even one Turk?” wrote Maxim Kononenko, a prominent, pro-Kremlin blogger. “And
so it is with all those who spoke in Turkey’s name today. They are all Turks
and you cannot trust them.”

Some Russians have
described yesterday’s shoot-down in larger historical terms: it is the first
time that there has been a real, military conflict between Russia and NATO, wrote the liberal
Slon.ru. Russian officialdom, however, is framing this squarely as a conflict
between Russia and the hotheaded, trigger-happy Turks. Wednesday’s evening
news, dedicated almost exclusively to the incident, made much hay out
of the fact that Washington and Europe, even NATO, spent all of Tuesday
chastising Turkey and throwing cold water on the idea that one plane and one
territorial incursion would lead to a wider conflict.

If anything, NATO
and the Europeans are the good guys in this interpretation of events —
certainly a first in recent Russian history. Why? Because Turkey, the villain
in this story, is trying to derail a grand, historic coalition against
terrorism, one that has Russia as its main axis. The de-escalation facilitated
by Western powers, the evening news report noted, “is needed so that this
conflict doesn’t harm the fight against terrorism in general and against ISIS
specifically.” That is, Russia sees itself as doing the work necessary to
protect the civilized world against the threat of terrorism, work that benefits
France, Britain, and the United States as much as it benefits Russia. (Left
unstated is the assumption that it doesn’t benefit Turkey, or its
Islamist-sympathizing government.) It is analogous to the way Russia has
portrayed its role in World War II, especially recently: Russia fought back the
menace of fascism for the good of the ungrateful West, which would have drowned
if not for Moscow’s help.

This is why,
beneath the propaganda and cynical geopolitical maneuvering, Moscow finds
Western critiques about its role in Syria so deeply frustrating, insulting
even. To Russia, such complaints are as old as time, centuries-old efforts to
block Russian imperial ambitions at every possible turn for no apparent reason
— even to the point of lining up with the Muslim Ottomans against Christian Rus
in the mid-19th century. And, much to Russia’s chagrin, this constant Western
interference greatly slowed Russian imperial expansion.

At the same time,
Russia has historically viewed the Turks as a good buffer against European
expansion. “If we have allowed the Turkish government to continue to exist in
Europe, it is because that government, under the predominant influence of our
superiority, suits us better than any of those which could be set up on its
ruins,” wrote Karl Nesselrode, the Russian empire’s foreign minister, in 1830.
Sound familiar? The instinct for maintaining the stability of unsavory
neighboring powers, even as Russia slowly chips away at their peripheries, is
an old one, encoded deep in the Russian state psyche. These other powers exist,
in one form or another, as mirrors in which Russia can see itself as an empire,
and preen.

I mention all this
ancient history because the conflict over the Russian plane in Turkish airspace
— and, according to my sources in the U.S. government, it was in Turkish
airspace — is not about the plane, or the airspace, or the Islamic State, or
even NATO. It is about two empires, the Russian and the Ottoman, that continue
to violently disintegrate to this day, decades after they have formally ceased
to exist. Look at Ukraine and Moldova, look at Syria and Iraq. These are the
death throes of empire, the long tails of their legacies, shaking themselves
out as the rest of the world tries to contain and smooth the convulsions of
transition.

And it is about two
men, Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who, without much irony, see
themselves as heirs to the two mantles of these two long-gone empires. They, in
turn, have revived those empires in the minds of their subjects, constantly
dangling before their eyes the holograms of greatness past. It is no surprise,
then, that, as the number of actors and the potential for conflict has grown in
Syria, that the first flash of it would happen between two men who feel so
keenly their countries’ phantom limbs.

Saturday, August 15, 2015

Claiming the Quran’s support, the Islamic State
codifies sex slavery in conquered regions of Iraq and Syria and uses the
practice as a recruiting tool.

Qadiya, Iraq -Rukimini Callimachi

Ibleesis with their sex-slaves:

In the moments before he raped
the 12-year-old girl, the Islamic State fighter took the time to explain that
what he was about to do was not a sin. Because the preteen girl practiced a
religion other than Islam, the Quran not only gave him the right to rape her —
it condoned and encouraged it, he insisted.

He bound her hands and gagged her. Then he
knelt beside the bed and prostrated himself in prayer before getting on top of
her.

When it was over, he knelt to pray again,
bookending the rape with acts of religious devotion.

“I kept telling him it hurts — please stop,”
said the girl, whose body is so small an adult could circle her waist with two
hands. “He told me that according to Islam he is allowed to rape an unbeliever.
He said that by raping me, he is drawing closer to God,” she said in an
interview alongside her family in a refugee camp here, to which she escaped
after 11 months of captivity.

The systematic rape of women and girls from the Yazidi religious
minority has become deeply enmeshed in the organization and the radical
theology of the Islamic State in the year since the group announced it was
reviving slavery as an institution. Interviews with 21 women and girls who
recently escaped the Islamic State, as well as an examination of the group’s
official communications, illuminate how the practice has been enshrined in the
group’s core tenets.

The trade in Yazidi women and girls has created a persistent
infrastructure, with a network of warehouses where the victims are held,
viewing rooms where they are inspected and marketed, and a dedicated fleet of
buses used to transport them.

A total of 5,270 Yazidis were abducted last year, and at least 3,144 are
still being held, according to community leaders. To handle them, the Islamic
State has developed a detailed bureaucracy of sex slavery, including sales
contracts notarized by the ISIS-run Islamic courts. And the practice has become
an established recruiting tool to lure men from deeply conservative Muslim
societies, where casual sex is taboo and dating is forbidden.

A growing body of internal policy memos and theological discussions has
established guidelines for slavery, including a lengthy how-to manual issued by
the Islamic State Research and Fatwa Department just last month. Repeatedly,
the ISIS leadership has emphasized a narrow and selective reading of the Quran
and other religious rulings to not only justify violence, but also to elevate
and celebrate each sexual assault as spiritually beneficial, even virtuous.

“Every time that he came to rape me, he would pray,” said F, a
15-year-old girl who was captured on the shoulder of Mount Sinjar one year ago
and was sold to an Iraqi fighter in his 20s. Like some others interviewed by
The New York Times, she wanted to be identified only by her first initial
because of the shame associated with rape.

“He kept telling me this is ibadah,” she said, using a term
from Islamic scripture meaning worship.

“He said that raping me is his
prayer to God. I said to him, ‘What you’re doing to me is wrong, and it will
not bring you closer to God.’ And he said, ‘No, it’s allowed. It’s halal,’ ”
said the teenager, who escaped in April with the help of smugglers after being
enslaved for nearly nine months.

Calculated Conquest

The Islamic State’s formal introduction of
systematic sexual slavery dates to Aug. 3, 2014, when its fighters invaded the
villages on the southern flank of Mount Sinjar, a craggy massif of dun-colored
rock in northern Iraq.

Its valleys and ravines are home to the
Yazidis, a tiny religious minority who represent less than 1.5 percent of
Iraq’s estimated population of 34 million.

The offensive on the mountain came just two
months after the fall of Mosul, the second-largest city in Iraq. At first, it
appeared that the subsequent advance on the mountain was just another attempt
to extend the territory controlled by Islamic State fighters.

Almost immediately, there were signs that their
aim this time was different.

Survivors say that men and women were separated
within the first hour of their capture. Adolescent boys were told to lift up
their shirts, and if they had armpit hair, they were directed to join their
older brothers and fathers. In village after village, the men and older boys
were driven or marched to nearby fields, where they were forced to lie down in
the dirt and sprayed with automatic fire.

The women, girls and children, however, were
hauled off in open-bed trucks.

“The offensive on the mountain was as much a
sexual conquest as it was for territorial gain,” said Matthew Barber, a
University of Chicago expert on the Yazidi minority. He was in Dohuk, near
Mount Sinjar, when the onslaught began last summer and helped createa foundationthat provides psychological support for the escapees, who number
more than 2,000, according to community activists.

Fifteen-year-old F says her family of nine was
trying to escape, speeding up mountain switchbacks, when their aging Opel
overheated. She, her mother, and her sisters — 14, 7, and 4 years old — were
helplessly standing by their stalled car when a convoy of heavily armed Islamic
State fighters encircled them.

“Right away, the fighters separated the men
from the women,” she said. She, her mother and sisters were first taken in
trucks to the nearest town on Mount Sinjar. “There, they separated me from my
mom. The young, unmarried girls were forced to get into buses.”

The buses were white, with a painted stripe
next to the word “Hajj,” suggesting that the Islamic State had commandeered
Iraqi government buses used to transport pilgrims for the annual pilgrimage to
Mecca. So many Yazidi women and girls were loaded inside F’s bus that they were
forced to sit on each other’s laps, she said.

Once the bus headed out, they noticed that the
windows were blocked with curtains, an accouterment that appeared to have been
added because the fighters planned to transport large numbers of women who were
not covered in burqas or head scarves.

F’s account, including the physical description
of the bus, the placement of the curtains and the manner in which the women were
transported, is echoed by a dozen other female victims interviewed for this
article. They described a similar set of circumstances even though they were
kidnapped on different days and in locations miles apart.

F says she was driven to the
Iraqi city of Mosul some six hours away, where they herded them into the Galaxy
Wedding Hall. Other groups of women and girls were taken to a palace from the
Saddam Hussein era, the Badoosh prison compound and the Directory of Youth
building in Mosul, recent escapees said. And in addition to Mosul, women were
herded into elementary schools and municipal buildings in the Iraqi towns of
Tal Afar, Solah, Ba’aj and Sinjar City.

They would be held in confinement, some for
days, some for months. Then, inevitably, they were loaded into the same fleet
of buses again before being sent in smaller groups to Syria or to other
locations inside Iraq, wherethey were bought and sold for sex.

“It was 100 percent preplanned,” said Khider
Domle, a Yazidi community activist who maintains a detailed database of the
victims. “I spoke by telephone to the first family who arrived at the Directory
of Youth in Mosul, and the hall was already prepared for them. They had
mattresses, plates and utensils, food and water for hundreds of people.”

In each location, survivors say Islamic State
fighters first conducted a census of their female captives.

Inside the voluminous Galaxy banquet hall, F
sat on the marble floor, squeezed between other adolescent girls. In all she
estimates there were over 1,300 Yazidi girls sitting, crouching, splayed out
and leaning against the walls of the ballroom, a number that is confirmed by
several other women held in the same location.

They each described how three Islamic State
fighters walked in, holding a register. They told the girls to stand. Each one
was instructed to state her first, middle and last name, her age, her hometown,
whether she was married, and if she had children.

For two months, F was held inside the Galaxy
hall. Then one day, they came and began removing young women. Those who refused
were dragged out by their hair, she said.

In the parking lot the same fleet of Hajj buses
was waiting to take them to their next destination, said F. Along with 24 other
girls and young women, the 15-year-old was driven to an army base in Iraq. It
was there in the parking lot that she heard the word “sabaya”for
the first time.

“They laughed and jeered at us, saying ‘You are
our sabaya.’ I didn’t know what that word meant,” she said. Later on, the local
Islamic State leader explained it meant slave.

“He told us that Taus Malik” — one of seven
angels to whom the Yazidis pray — “is not God. He said that Taus Malik is the
devil and that because you worship the devil, you belong to us. We can sell you
and use you as we see fit.”

The Islamic State’s sex trade appears to be
based solely on enslaving women and girls from the Yazidi minority. As yet,
there has been no widespread campaign aimed at enslaving women from other
religious minorities, said Samer Muscati, the author of the recent Human Rights
Watch report. That assertion was echoed by community leaders, government
officials and other human rights workers.

Mr. Barber, of the University of Chicago, said
that the focus on Yazidis was likely because they are seen as polytheists, with
an oral tradition rather than a written scripture. In the Islamic State’s eyes
that puts them on the fringe of despised unbelievers, even more than Christians
and Jews, who are considered to have some limited protections under the Quran
as “People of the Book.”

In Kojo, one of the southernmost villages on
Mount Sinjar and among the farthest away from escape, residents decided to
stay, believing they would be treated as theChristians of Mosulhad months earlier.
On Aug. 15, 2014, the Islamic State ordered the residents to report to a school
in the center of town.

When she got there, 40-year-old Aishan Ali
Saleh found a community elder negotiating with the Islamic State, asking if
they could be allowed to hand over their money and gold in return for safe
passage.

The fighters initially agreed and laid out a
blanket, where Ms. Saleh placed her heart-shaped pendant and her gold rings,
while the men left crumpled bills.

Instead of letting them go, the fighters began
shoving the men outside, bound for death.

Sometime later, a fleet of cars arrived and the
women, girls and children were driven away.

The Market

Months later, the Islamic State made clear in
their online magazine that their campaign of enslaving Yazidi women and girls
had been extensively preplanned.

“Prior to the taking of Sinjar, Shariah
students in the Islamic State were tasked to research the Yazidis,” said the
English-language article, headlined “The Revival of Slavery Before the Hour,”
which appeared in the October issue of Dabiq.

The article made clear that for the Yazidis,
there was no chance to pay a tax known as jizya to be set free, “unlike the
Jews and Christians.”

“After
capture, the Yazidi women and children were then divided according to the
Shariah amongst the fighters of the Islamic State who participated in the
Sinjar operations, after one fifth of the slaves were transferred to the
Islamic State’s authority to be divided” as spoils, the article said.

In much the same way as specific Bible passages
were used centuries later to support the slave trade in the United States, the
Islamic State cites specific verses or stories in the Quran or else in the
Sunna, the traditions based on the sayings and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad,
to justify their human trafficking, experts say.

Scholars of Islamic theology disagree, however,
on the proper interpretation of these verses, and on the divisive question of
whether Islam actually sanctions slavery.

Many argue that slavery figures in Islamic
scripture in much the same way that it figures in the Bible — as a reflection
of the period in antiquity in which the religion was born.

“In the milieu in which the Quran arose, there
was a widespread practice of men having sexual relationships with unfree
women,” said Kecia Ali, an associate professor of religion at Boston University
and the author of a book on slavery in early Islam. “It wasn’t a particular
religious institution. It was just how people did things.”

Cole Bunzel, a scholar of Islamic theology at
Princeton University, disagrees, pointing to the numerous references to the
phrase “Those your right hand possesses” in the Quran, which for centuries has
been interpreted to mean female slaves. He also points to the corpus of Islamic
jurisprudence, which continues into the modern era and which he says includes
detailed rules for the treatment of slaves.

“There is a great deal of scripture that
sanctions slavery,” said Mr. Bunzel, the author of a research paper published
by the Brookings Institution on the ideology of the Islamic State. “You can
argue that it is no longer relevant and has fallen into abeyance. ISIS would
argue that these institutions need to be revived, because that is what the
Prophet and his companions did.”

The youngest, prettiest women and girls were
bought in the first weeks after their capture. Others — especially older,
married women — described how they were transported from location to location,
spending months in the equivalent of human holding pens, until a prospective
buyer bid on them.

Their captors appeared to have a system in
place, replete with its own methodology of inventorying the women, as well as
their own lexicon. Women and girls were referred to as “Sabaya,” followed by
their name. Some were bought by wholesalers, who photographed and gave them
numbers, to advertise them to potential buyers.

Osman Hassan Ali, a Yazidi businessman who has
successfully smuggled out numerous Yazidi women, said he posed as a buyer in
order to be sent the photographs. He shared a dozen images, each one showing a
Yazidi woman sitting in a bare room on a couch, facing the camera with a blank,
unsmiling expression. On the edge of the photograph is written in Arabic,
“Sabaya No. 1,” “Sabaya No. 2,” and so on.

Buildings where the women were collected and
held sometimes included a viewing room.

“When they put us in the building, they said we
had arrived at the ‘Sabaya Market,’” said one 19-year-old victim, whose first
initial is I. “I understood we were now in a slave market.”

She estimated there were at least 500 other
unmarried women and girls in the multistory building, with the youngest among
them being 11. When the buyers arrived, the girls were taken one by one into a
separate room.

“The emirs sat against the wall and called us
by name. We had to sit in a chair facing them. You had to look at them, and
before you went in, they took away our scarves and anything we could have used
to cover ourselves,” she said.

“When it was my turn, they made me stand four
times. They made me turn around.”

The captives were also forced to answer
intimate questions, including reporting the exact date of their last menstrual
cycle. They realized that the fighters were trying to determine whether they
were pregnant, in keeping with a Shariah rule stating that a man cannot have
intercourse with his slave if she is pregnant.

Property of ISIS

The use of sex slavery by the Islamic State
initially surprised even the group’s most ardent supporters, many of whom
sparred with journalists online after the first reports of systematic rape.

The Islamic State’s leadership has repeatedly
sought to justify the practice to its internal audience.

After the initial article in Dabiq in October,
the issue came up in the publication again this year, in an editorial in May
that expressed the writer’s hurt and dismay at the fact that some of the
group’s own sympathizers had questioned the institution of slavery.

“What really alarmed me was that some of the
Islamic State’s supporters started denying the matter as if the soldiers of the
Khilafah had committed a mistake or evil,” the author wrote. “I write this
while the letters drip of pride,’’ he said. “We have indeed raided and captured
the kafirahwomen and drove them like sheep by the edge of the sword.” Kafirah
refers to infidels.

In a pamphletpublished onlinein December, the Research and Fatwa Department of the Islamic State
detailed best practices, including explaining that slaves belong to the estate
of the fighter who bought them and therefore can be willed to another man and
disposed of just like any other property after his death.

Recent escapees describe an intricate
bureaucracy surrounding their captivity, with their status as a slave
registered in a contract. When their owner would sell them to another buyer, a
new contract would be drafted, like transferring a property deed. At the same
time, slaves can also be set free, and fighters are promised a heavenly reward
for doing so.

Though rare, this has created one avenue of
escape for victims.

A 25-year-old victim who escaped last month,
identified by her first initial, A, described how one day her Libyan master
handed her a laminated piece of paper. He explained that he had finished his
training as a suicide bomber and was planning to blow himself up, and was therefore
setting her free.

Labeled a “Certificate of Emancipation,” the
document was signed by the judge of the western province of the Islamic State.
The Yazidi woman presented it at security checkpoints as she left Syria to
return to Iraq, where she rejoined her family in July.

The Islamic State recently made it clear that
sex with Christian and Jewish women captured in battle is also permissible,
according to a new 34-page manual issued this summer by the terror group’s
Research and Fatwa Department.

Just about the only prohibition is having sex
with a pregnant slave, and the manual describes how an owner must wait for a
female captive to have her menstruating cycle, in order to “make sure there is
nothing in her womb,” before having intercourse with her. Of the 21 women and
girls interviewed for this article, among the only ones who had not been raped
were the women who were already pregnant at the moment of their capture, as
well as those who were past menopause.

Beyond that, there appears to be no bounds to what
is sexually permissible. Child rape is explicitly condoned: “It is permissible
to have intercourse with the female slave who hasn’t reached puberty, if she is
fit for intercourse,” according to a translation by the Middle East Media
Research Institute of a pamphlet published on Twitter last December.

One 34-year-old Yazidi woman, who was bought and repeatedly raped by a
Saudi fighter in the Syrian city of Shadadi, described how she fared better
than the second slave in the household — a 12-year-old girl who was raped for
days on end despite heavy bleeding.

“He destroyed her body. She was badly infected. The fighter kept coming
and asking me, ‘Why does she smell so bad?’ And I said, she has an infection on
the inside, you need to take care of her,” the woman said.

Unmoved, he ignored the girl’s agony, continuing the ritual of praying
before and after raping the child.

“I said to him, ‘She’s just a little girl,’ ” the older woman recalled.
“And he answered: ‘No. She’s not a little girl. She’s a slave. And she knows
exactly how to have sex.’ ’’

“And having sex with her pleases God,” he said.

-This article was published by the NEW YORK TIMES on the 14th of August 2015

About Me

I graduated from the French University in Beirut (St Joseph) specialising in Political and Economic Sciences. I started my working life in 1973 as a reporter and journalist for the pan-Arab magazine “Al-Hawadess” in Lebanon later becoming its Washington, D.C. correspondent. I subsequently moved to London in 1979 joining “Al-Majallah” magazine as its Deputy Managing Editor. In 1984 joined “Assayad” magazine in London initially as its Managing Editor and later as Editor-in-Chief. Following this, in 1990 I joined “Al-Wasat” magazine (part of the Dar-Al-Hayat Group) in London as a Managing Editor. In 2011 I became the Editor-In-Chief of Miraat el-Khaleej (Gulf Mirror). In July 2012 I became the Chairman of The Board of Asswak Al-Arab Publishing Ltd in UK and the Editor In Chief of its first Publication "Asswak Al-Arab" Magazine (Arab Markets Magazine) (www.asswak-alarab.com).

I have already authored five books. The first “The Tears of the Horizon” is a love story. The second “The Winter of Discontent in The Gulf” (1991) focuses on the first Gulf war sparked by Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. His third book is entitled “Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: From Balfour Promise to Bush Declaration: The Complications and the Road to a Lasting Peace” (March 2008). The fourth book is titled “How Iran Plans to Fight America and Dominate the Middle East” (October 2008) And the fifth and the most recent is titled "JIHAD'S NEW HEARTLANDS: Why The West Has Failed To Contain Islamic Fundamentalism" (May 2011).

Furthermore, I wrote the memoirs of national security advisor to US President Ronald Reagan, Mr Robert McFarlane, serializing them in “Al-Wasat” magazine over 14 episodes in 1992.

Over the years, I have interviewed and met several world leaders such as American President Bill Clinton, British Prime Minister Margaret Thacher, Late King Hassan II of Morocco, Late King Hussein of Jordan,Tunisian President Zein El-Abedine Bin Ali, Lybian Leader Moammar Al-Quadhafi,President Amine Gemayel of Lebanon,late Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, Late Palestinian Chairman Yasser Arafat, Haitian President Jean Claude Duvalier, Late United Arab Emirates President Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan,Algerian President Shazli Bin Jdid, Jamaican Prime Minister Edward Siyagha and more...